Why Google Places is Important for International Business?

June 05, 2012

According to Google, 97% of consumers search for local
businesses online. Submitting your local offices and shops is a
good idea as a best practice for Global SEO. A lot of users will
use "Keyword+location" when they make a local search
for services or product. Implementing your locations will help your
Global SEO gain an effective rank and maintain high
visibility with your potential customers.

Best Practices for Google Places Listings

In order to obtain an effective local listing you
will need to follow some of the basic rules for a Google Places
listing:

Add your company or business name exactly as it appears in the
offline world.

o Avoid including
marketing or advertising text and keywords in your business
name.

o Use full company name
and avoid shortcuts or special characters.

Use an accurate Business Location with your physical office
location.

o Insert a very
specific Address including area, street, floor and suite number
into Address Line 1, and put your mail box or suite number in
Address Line 2.

o Do not create
more than one listing for each business location, either in a
single account or multiple accounts.

o Avoid including
advertising information into the address lines that does not
pertain to your business's physical location (e.g. URLs,
keywords).

Make sure you list all of your phone numbers for the listed
location including office numbers, toll free numbers, mobile
numbers and fax numbers.

o Provide only the
phone numbers that represents your individual business
location.

o Use a local
phone number instead of a call center number whenever possible.

Use the local version of your website and email address. If you
are listing your business in USA you will need of course to use the
English version of your website not another language version.

Add all your local services to the category form. This will
help with indexing your local services for each local SERPs.

o Categories
should describe what your business is
(e.g. Translation), not on what it does
(e.g. translate into Spanish).

It is very important to use localized information for your
local content. For instance, if you are listing your business
office in Mexico City, it is more effective to provide all
the listing information in Spanish not English. Always keep in mind
you are targeting local online users.

Google Maps

Google Maps is one of the strongest tools created by Google.
Maps are always important because it helps local searcher to locate
what they are looking for easily. Secondly, if you have a
business office or shop that provides services in that specific
area you can also add your business in local listing and people can
discover you by navigating the maps.

Google, Google Places, the Google logo are either
registered trademarks or trademarks of Google Incorporated in the
United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the
property of their respective owners.

Website Localization Benefits for Local Search

Websites are the access point for your local markets. It is very
important to have fully localized websites and information for each
local market. A fully localized website in the locale language will
always have a direct impact on your local presence and your firm's
SEO results. Online users will always tend to search the local
version of your websites in order to get local prices, services
descriptions and contact information. For more information check
our blog post 10
Tips for Website Localization.

The Benefits of Google Places for Local SEO Results

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your multilingual
websites for Google local search in order to obtain the best rank
and visibility in Google local index.

Global businesses are investing more and more time and resources
to expand their online presence and achieve better sales in local
places where they are represented. By using localized websites for
local markets, it has been proven that businesses will be more
likely to achieve their goal of being found by a local search
because they have higher rankings (SERPS - search engine results
pages) in the search engines.

You may gain further insights into Global SEO and
related topics by reviewing previous blogs written by GPI:

Comments

Fotini Limes - Director, Global AccountsFluent in German, Greek, French and Italian (as well as
English), Fotini has over 15 years of localization industry
experience serving in a multitude of operational and sales roles.
She has extensive experience in document, software, website and
multimedia localization and manages day-to-day global production
for GPI's project management and translation teams. She has lived
and worked in Germany, Greece, France and the USA.